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In April on Phoronix there were 221 published original news articles and 20 featured length articles. Here's what was most popular among the plethora of original Linux content with a bent on performance testing, graphics drivers, power management, and Linux gaming.

With 221 original news postings on Phoronix in April that puts the average of over seven news postings per day of the month. Nearly everyone, of course, is single-handedly written by your's truly. There was also nearly one original multi-page featured article every day.

Next month Phoronix will be turning nine years old and in that time there is now more than 8,500 news articles and more than 2,300 featured length articles. To continue to see the site upbeat going into the next decade, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium (ad-free viewing and viewing multi-page articles on a single page) or making a PayPal tip. Flattr is also accepted. Thanks!

Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3In the road to the release of Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" later this month will be a number of articles benchmarking this major Linux distribution update against its friends and competitors. To complement the Ubuntu 13.04 benchmarks already delivered, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 benchmarks, here are tests of Apple's OS X 10.8.3 operating system on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and the latest Ubuntu 13.04 (post Beta 2) state. Ubuntu 13.04 is generally competitive with OS X 10.8 and in some new areas is now beating out Apple's operating system on their own hardware.

Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS vs. Ubuntu 13.04 BenchmarksFor those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there's a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Windows 7 & Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 & Fedora 18Last month Phoronix published Intel OpenGL benchmarks showing Windows 8 outperforming Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest Windows and Linux drivers from Intel. I also showed that even with the KDE and Xfce desktops rather than the default Unity/Compiz desktop to Ubuntu, Windows 8 still was faster on this Intel "Ivy Bridge" platform. The new benchmarks to share today from this Intel Ultrabook are the Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.04 results but also with performance figures added in from Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 x64 and Fedora 18.

32-bit vs. 64-bit Ubuntu 13.04 Linux PerformanceWhile nearly all modern Intel/AMD x86 hardware is 64-bit capable, among novice Linux users the question commonly is whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of a given distribution. We have previously delivered benchmarks showing Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance while in this article is an updated look in seeing how the 32-bit versus 64-bit binary performance compares when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.

AMD Radeon Gallium3D More Competitive With Catalyst On LinuxWith the ever-changing state of Linux graphics drivers -- both for the open and closed-source drivers -- new tests have been conducted to compare the OpenGL graphics performance on Linux with AMD Radeon graphics. In this article are benchmarks of nine different Radeon HD graphics cards when being tested on the very latest AMD Catalyst (13.3 Beta 3) graphics driver as well as the open-source AMD Radeon driver consisting of Mesa 9.2-devel and the yet-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows ShortcomingsOne week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it's not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.

LLVM/Clang 3.3 Very Competitive To GCC 4.8Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It's interesting.

15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU ComparisonCombining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.

The most popular news stories were:

NVIDIA Has Major New Linux Driver: Optimus, RandR 1.4NVIDIA announced the 319.12 Beta Linux graphics driver announcement this morning. While the number may seem mundane, this is a very exciting NVIDIA Linux graphics driver update. It presents work that will benefit the agonized NVIDIA Optimus Linux users, provides new RandR functionality, and other new features.

The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now "Banned"It's now becoming quite easy to understand why the developer of the Northfield/Norwood fork of Wayland was ejected from the Wayland development community and banned from development communication channels.

Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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